NetEqualizer News: May 2013

May 19, 2013 — netequalizer

May 2013

Greetings!

Enjoy another issue of NetEqualizer News! This month, we preview our upcoming integration of our Microsoft Excel Dynamic Real-Time Reporting Tool into NetEqualizer, discuss our new Hotel Management System Integration Offering, and feature a story from a happy NetEqualizer Customer. As always, feel free to pass this along to others who might be interested in NetEqualizer News.
A message from Art…
Art Reisman, CTO – APconnections

art_smallIn May, my thoughts turn to the BolderBoulder, a large 10K running race that I compete in each year. The race has 50,000+ participants, and is split into two, a “people’s race” and  a “professionals race” (International Team Challenge). I compete first and then watch the professionals race, which is usually won by someone from Ethiopia or Kenya, as professionals fly in from all over the world for this race. By May my goal is always to train hard, so that I am at my peak performance on Memorial Day for the run. I work hard to get ready, and plan to run a personal best this year!

We love it when we hear back from you – so if you have a story you would like to share with us of how we have helped you, let us know. Email me directly at art@apconnections.net. I would love to hear from you!

New! Our Hotel Management System Integration Offering

APconnections is excited to announce our Hotel Management System Integrated Offering (HMSIO). We have partnered with Global Gossip, LLC, a leader in the lodging managed network services industry, to offer an end-to-end network managed services solution for our hotel & lodging customers.
hmsio_data_sheet
We are combining strengths to offer NetEqualizer, the best in bandwidth shaping, with Global Gossip’s world class managed network services offering. We now can offer our hotel and lodging customers a full suite of capabilities to manage your wireless network, such as authentication, 24/7/365 support, cloud-based monitoring access, and network design services.

Hotel Management System Integrated Offering has grown organically from Global Gossip’s own use of NetEqualizers in its wireless services solutions in remote places all over the world, including many U.S. National Parks.For more details, check out our HMSIO Data Sheet, or contact us at:

sales@apconnections.net

-or-

toll-free U.S. (888-287-2492),

worldwide (303) 997-1300 x. 103

NetEqualizer Featured Customer

Every so often, NetEqualizer News features a customer who has benefited greatly from our technology and has told us about it!

This month, we feature Gordon College, and Russ Leathe, Director of Network and Computing Services.Here is what Russ had to say about his experience with NetEqualizer:

“We had an incident over the weekend I wanted to tell you about:
gordon_collegeOne of our web servers got hit with a ‘zero-day’ malware. We noticed our bandwidth was completely pegged even though our student population was on, or leaving for Spring-Break (so our bandwidth consumption should have been trending downwards, not upwards). We maintain over 100 servers, 95% of which are in a VM environment. Needless to say, finding the exposed culprit would be like finding the proverbial “needle in a haystack”.Alas, NetEQ to the rescue.

We used NTOP to discover our ‘Top Talkers’.  The Inbound bandwidth was saturated, which was unusual and we pinpointed it to one machine. We quickly wrote a bandwidth rule for that web-server and things returned to normal.
We found the malware and inoculated the server…all within an hour’s time. Normally, this could have taken hours or a few days.

Thanks again… for creating such a great solution for Higher ED!!”

Thanks Russ!

Coming Soon: Microsoft Excel Dynamic Real-Time Reporting Integration

One of our most popular unpublished tools that we release to customers who request it is our Dynamic Real-Time Reporting tool which sends data from your NetEqualizer to Excel so that you can monitor usage from your local PC.

The next generation of this software has arrived.

Coming soon, we will be releasing our built in version of this tool so that you can get the same benefits of its reporting features right on your NetEqualizer. It will require no setup and will be completely web based.

Here is a quick screenshot preview:

micro

You’ll be able to view active connections, connections which are bandwidth hogs, IP to country translation, and more!

This tool is free to customers with valid NetEqualizer Software and Support. If you are not current with NSS, contact us today!

sales@apconnections.net

-or-

toll-free U.S. (888-287-2492),

worldwide (303) 997-1300 x. 103

Best Of The Blog

You Heard it Here First, Our Prediction on How Video Will Evolve to Conserve Bandwidth

By Art Reisman – CTO – APconnections

Editors Note:

I suspect somebody out there has already thought of this, but in my quick Internet search I could not find any references to this specific idea, so I am taking journalistic first claim and unofficial first rights to this idea.

The best example I think of to exemplify efficiency in video, are the old style cartoons,  such as the parody of South Park. If you ever watch South Park animation, the production quality is done deliberately cheesy – very few moving parts with fixed backgrounds. In the South Park case, the intention was obviously not to save production costs. The cheap animation is part of the comedy. That was not always the case, the evolution of this sort of stop animation cartoon was from the early days before computer animation took over the work of human artists working frame by frame. The fewer moving parts in a scene, the less work for the animator. They could re-use existing drawings of a figure and just change the orientation of the mouth in perhaps three positions to animate talking.

Modern video compression tries to take advantage of some of the inherit static data from image to image , such that, each new frame is transmitted with less information.  At best, this is a hit or miss proposition.  There are likely many frivolous moving parts in a back ground that perhaps on the small screen of hand held device are not necessary.

My prediction is we will soon see a collaboration between production of video and Internet transport providers that allows for the average small device video production to have a much smaller footprint in transit.

Some of the basics of this technique would involve…
Photo Of The Month

IMG_0456
This picture of downtown Helsinki, Finland was taken on a recent visit to a customer site by one of our staff members.
Posted in Newsletters. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

APconnections and Global Gossip Announce Joint Network Solution Offering for Lodging Industry

May 16, 2013 — netequalizer

Editor’s Note:  This release went out on May 16, 2013 11:05 AM Mountain Daylight Time.

LAFAYETTE, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–APconnections, an innovation-driven technology company that delivers best-in-class network traffic management appliances, and Global Gossip, a leader in network managed services for the lodging industry, today announced the joint Hotel Management System Integrated Offering (HMSIO).

“Working with APconnections on this joint solution offers tremendous potential. Since the integration of NetEqualizer into our head-end stack we have been able to offer a much improved end user Wi-Fi experience and overall greater customer satisfaction.”

The joint offering combines the strengths of the NetEqualizer behavior-based bandwidth shaping appliance, with Global Gossip’s world-class managed network services offering. HMSIO will offer hotel and lodging customers a full suite of capabilities to manage their wireless networks, including customized authentication, behavior-based bandwidth shaping, 24/7/365 support, a cloud-based monitoring portal, and network design services. With HMSIO, hospitality and lodging customers can provide a “low noise”, high-quality, wireless Internet experience to guests along with unmatched excellence in customer support. Learn more in our HMSIO Data Sheet.

Global Gossip’s Director of U.S. Operations, Sam Beskur, says, “Working with APconnections on this joint solution offers tremendous potential. Since the integration of NetEqualizer into our head-end stack we have been able to offer a much improved end user Wi-Fi experience and overall greater customer satisfaction.”

APconnections’ CEO, Art Reisman, stated, “We have been looking for the right partner to offer an end-to-end network solution to our lodging industry customers. With their worldwide footprint and excellent technical support, Global Gossip’s network services are a great complement to our NetEqualizer bandwidth shaping products.”

About Global Gossip

Global Gossip (http://hsia.globalgossip.com) has been developing network and communication solutions since 1999 and currently manages and maintains over three hundred wired and wireless access networks globally. Our service locations span seven countries and include locations as remote and bandwidth challenged as the central Australian desert to high throughput networks in downtown London, England. Global Gossip has offices in Denver, Colorado; Sydney, Australia; and London, England.

About APconnections

APconnections is a privately held company founded in 2003 and is based in Lafayette, Colorado, USA (http://netequalizer.com). Our flexible and scalable network traffic management solutions can be found at thousands of customer sites in public and private organizations of all sizes across the globe, including: Fortune 500 companies, major universities, K-12 schools, Internet providers, libraries, and government agencies on six continents.

Contacts

APconnections, Inc.
Sandy McGregor, 303-997-1300 x.104
sandy@apconnections.net
or
Global Gossip LLC
Stephanie Dickens, 720-378-5087
sdickens@globalgossip.net

Posted in Press Releases. Leave a Comment »

Your heard it here first, our prediction on how video will evolve to conserve bandwidth

May 8, 2013 — netequalizer

Editors Note:

I suspect somebody out there has already thought of this,  but in my quick internet search I could not find any references to this specific idea, so I am takaing journalistic first  claim unofficial first rights to this idea.

The best example I think of to exemplify efficiency in video, are the old style cartoons,  such as the parody of South Park. If you ever watch south park animation,  the production quality  is done deliberately cheesy, very few moving parts with fixed backgrounds. In the South Park case, the intention was obviously not to save production costs.  The cheap animation is part of the comedy. That was not always the case,  the evolution of this sort of stop animation cartoon was from the early days  before computer animation took over the work of human artists working frame by frame. The fewer moving parts in a scene, the less work for the animator.  They could re-use existing drawings of a figure and just change the orientation of the mouth in perhaps three positions to animate talking.

Modern video compression tries to take advantage of some of the inherit static data from image to image , such that, each new frame is transmitted with less information.  At best, this is a hit or miss proposition.  There are likely many frivolous moving parts in a back ground that perhaps on the small screen of hand held device are not necessary.

My prediction is we will soon see a collaboration between production of video and Internet transport providers that allows for the average small device video production to have a much smaller footprint in transit.

Some of the basics of this technique would involve.

1) deliberately blurring or sending a background separate from the action. Think of a wide shot of break away lay-up in a basketball game. All you really need to see is the player and the basket in the frame the brain is going to ignore background details such as the crowd, they might as well be static character animations, especially on the scale of the screen of your Iphone not the same experience as your 56 inch HD flat screen.

2) Many of the videos in circulation the internet are news casts of a talking head giving the latest headlines. If you wanted to be extreme, you could  make the production such that the head is  tiny and animate it like a south park character,  this will take a much smaller footprint but technically still be video, and it would be much more like to play through without pausing.

3) The content sender can actually send a different production of the same video for low-bandwidth clients.

Note the reason why the production side of the house must get involved with the compression and delivery side of video is that the compression engines can only make assumptions on what is important and what is not, when removing information (pixels) from a video.

With a smart production engine geared toward the Internet, there is big savings here. Video is busting out all over the Internet and conserving from a production side only makes sense if you want to get your content deployed and viewed everywhere .

The security industry also does something similar taking advantage with fixed cameras on fixed backgrounds.

Related How much YouTube can the Internet Handle

Related Out of the box ideas on how to speed up your Internet

Blog dedicated to video compression, Euclid Discoveries.

 

 

Posted in Bandwidth Management, Educational Articles, Research. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

How Many Users Can Your High Density Wireless Network Support? Find Out Before you Deploy.

April 29, 2013 — netequalizer

By

Art Reisman

CTO http://www.netequalizer.com

Recently I wrote an article on how tough it has become to deploy wireless technology in high density areas.  It is difficult to predict final densities until fully deployed, and often this leads to missed performance expectations.

In a strange coincidence, while checking  in with my friends over at Candela Technologies last Friday , I was not  surprised to learn that their latest offering ,the Wiser-50 Mobile Wireless Network Emulator,  is taking the industry by storm.  

So how does their wireless emulator work and why would you need one ?

The Wiser-50  allows you to take your chosen access points, load them up with realistic  signals from a densely packed area of users, and play out different load scenarios without actually building out the network . The ability to this type of emulation  allows you to make adjustments to your design on paper without the costly trial and error of field trials.  You will be able to  see how your access points will behave under load  before you deploy them.  You can then make some reasonable assumptions on how densely to place your access points,  and more importantly get an idea on the upper bounds of your final network.

With IT deployments  scaling up into new territories of  densities, an investment in a wireless emulation tool will pay for itself many times over.  Especially when bidding on a project. The ability to justify how you have sized a quality solution over an ad-hock random solution, will allow your customer to make informed decisions on the trade -offs in wireless investment.

The technical capabilities of Wiser-50 are listed below.   If you are not familiar with all the terms involved with wireless testing I would suggest a call to Candelatech network engineers, they have years of experience helping all levels of customers and are extremely patient and easy to work with.

Scenario Definition Tool/Visualization

  • Complete Scenario Definition to add nodes, create mobility vectors and traffic profiles for run-time executable emulation.
  • Runtime GUI visualization with mobility and different link and traffic conditions.
  • Automatic Traffic generation & execution through the GUI.
  • Drag-and-drop capability for re-positioning of nodes.
  • Scenario consistency checks (against node capabilities and physical limitations such as speed of vehicle).
  • Mock-up run of the defined scenario (i.e., run that does not involve the emulator core to look at the scenario)
  • Manipulation of groups of nodes (positioning, movement as a group)
  • Capture and replay log files via GUI.
  • Support for 5/6 pre-defined scenarios.

RF Module

  • Support for TIREM, exponent-based, shadowing, fading, rain models (not included in base package.)
  • Support for adaptive modulation/coding for BER targets for ground-ground links.
  • Support for ground-to-ground & satellite waveforms
  • Support for MA TDMA (variants for ground-ground, ground-air & satellite links).
  • Support for minimal CSMA/CA functionality.
  • Support to add effects of selective ARQ & re-transmissions for the TDMA MAC.

Image

Related Articles

The Wireless Density Problem

Wireless Network Capacity Never Ending Quest Cisco Blog

Posted in Bandwidth Monitoring, Topics, Wireless Internet. Tags: , , , , . Leave a Comment »

NetEqualizer Directory Integration FAQ

April 24, 2013 — netequalizer

Editor’s Note: This month, we announced the availability of the NetEqualizer Directory Integration (NDI) feature. Over the past few weeks, interest and inquiries have been high, so we’ve created the following Q&A to address many of the common questions we’ve received.

What is NDI anyway?
NetEqualizer Directory Integration (NDI) is an API for NetEqualizer that allows you to pull in username information from a directory and display it in your active connections table. This way, instead of only seeing IP to IP connection information, you can see usernames associated with those IPs so that you can make better decisions about how to manage your bandwidth. We will gradually be expanding NDI functionality to allow for shaping by username.

How much does NDI cost?
NDI requires setup consultation and is an additional add-on feature for the NetEqualizer. Currently, version 7.0 is required to run NDI. Take a look at our price list for more information.

How does NDI work?
NDI is an API on NetEqualizer that sends your directory server a URL containing an IP address. The process on your directory server then looks up the username for that IP and returns it to the NetEqualizer which stores the information.

What am I responsible for implementing with NDI?
You are responsible for implementing the process which resides on the directory server. This process returns a username when given an IP by the NDI API call. We have examples of how to do this for some directory server setups, but directory server setups are too specific for us to create a generic process that will work for all customers.

When would knowing the username be helpful?
Knowing the username instead of simply IP-to-IP information can helpful for administrators in many ways. Here are just a few:
- Easily see which users are taking up a lot of bandwidth. This is doable with a manual look up but that can get tedious.
- Eventually, NDI will be enhanced to shape by username. Again, this helps take away a step that an administrator would have to perform manually.
- Often, users are not assigned static IP addresses. With NDI’s dynamic updating, you don’t have to worry about the IP anymore. The username information will automatically adjust.

What are the upcoming enhancements to NDI?
We are planning to make NDI more robust in the months ahead. Our first feature will be Quotas by Username. This feature is currently in Beta. Once this feature is implemented, you will be able to assign usage quotas by username as opposed to IP or subnet. Additional possible changes to NDI include shaping by username and limiting by username. Stay tuned to NetEqualizer News for announcements.

If you have additional questions about NDI, feel free to contact us at: sales@apconnections.net!

Posted in New Features, News, Research. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

APconnections Enhances NetEqualizer with Directory Integration Capability

April 23, 2013 — netequalizer

LAFAYETTE, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–APconnections, an innovation-driven technology company that delivers best-in-class network traffic management solutions, is excited to announce NetEqualizer Directory Integration (NDI), as part of our 7.0 Release for the NetEqualizer product line.

“NetEqualizer Directory Integration provides enhanced reporting for our customers. Our customers can identify the actual users consuming their valuable network bandwidth, so that they can react accordingly. I envision username identification to be incorporated into many areas in the future.“
Art Reisman
NetEqualizer Co-Founder and CTO

NetEqualizer Directory Integration marks the advent of username reporting within the NetEqualizer. With the capabilities offered by NDI, customers can now report on network activity in even more meaningful ways, tracking usage based on known usernames. In the 7.0 Release, we have added username to real-time activity data and quota usage. Our Internet Provider customers will be excited to learn that we have extended this capability to Named Quotas, capturing username on network bandwidth usage over defined time periods. For more details on the 7.0 Release, see our Software Updates.

The NetEqualizer is affordably priced and is available in license levels from 20Mbps ($3,400) to 5Gbps ($13,100) on networks up to 40,000 users. See our NetEqualizer Price List for complete details. One year renewable NetEqualizer Software & Support (NSS) and NetEqualizer Hardware Warranties (NHW) are offered.

NetEqualizer bandwidth shapers utilize our unique behavior-based “equalizing” technology, which implement fairness algorithms to automatically provide bandwidth shaping and traffic control to your network. Immediately you will see higher QoS and optimal network performance, all while reducing maintenance and customer complaints. Equalizing gives priority to latency-sensitive applications, such as VoIP, web browsing, chat and e-mail over large file downloads and video that can clog your Internet pipe.

About APconnections: APconnections is based in Lafayette, Colorado, USA. We released our first commercial offering in July 2003. Today, our flexible, scalable, and affordable solutions can be found in over 4,000 installations in many types of public and private organizations of all sizes across the globe, including: Fortune 500 companies, major universities, K-12 schools, and Internet providers on six (6) continents. Learn more at www.netequalizer.com or contact us at sales@apconnections.net.

Contacts

APconnections, Inc.
Sandy McGregor, 303-997-1300
Director, Marketing
sandy@apconnections.net

Posted in Press Releases. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

Five Tips to Control Encrypted Traffic on Your Network

April 23, 2013 — netequalizer

Editors Note:

Our intent with our tips is to exemplify some of the impracticalities involved with “brute force” shaping of encrypted traffic, and to offer some alternatives.

1) Insert Pre-Encryption software at each end node on your network.

This technique requires a special a custom APP that would need to be installed on Iphones, Ipads, and the laptops of end users. The app is designed  to relay all data to a centralized shaping device in an un-encrypted format.

  •   assumes that the a centralized  IT department has the authority to require special software on all devices using the network. It would not be feasible for environments where end users freely use their own equipment.

ssltraffic

2) Use a sniffer traffic shaper that can decrypt the traffic on the fly.

  • The older 40 bit encryption codes could be hacked by a computer in about a one week, the newer 128 bit encryption codes would require the computer to run longer than the age of the Universe.

3) Just drop encrypted traffic, don’t allow it, forcing users to turn off SSL on their browsers.   Note: A traffic shaper, can spot encrypted traffic, it  just can’t tell you specifically what it is by content.

  • Seems rather draconian to block secure private transmissions, however the need to encrypt traffic over the Internet is vastly overblown. It is actually extremely unlikely for a personal information or credit card to get stolen in transit , but that is another subject
  • Really not practical where you have autonomous or public users, it will cause confusion at best, a revolt at worst.

4) Perhaps re-think what you are trying to accomplish.   There are more heuristic approaches to managing traffic which are immune to encryption.  Please feel free to contact us for more details on a heuristic approach to shaping encrypted traffic.

5) Charge a premium for encrypted traffic.  This would be more practical than blocking encrypted traffic, and would perhaps offset some of the costs for associate with the  overuse of p2p encrypted traffic.

Posted in Bandwidth Management. Tags: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »
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